This Week in Classical Music: March 25, 2024.  Maurizio Pollini, one of the greatest pianists of the last half century, died two days ago, on March 23^rd in Milan at the age of 82.  His technique was phenomenal, even though he lost some of it in the last years of his life (he performed almost till the very end of his life and probably should’ve stopped earlier).  His Chopin was exquisite (no wonder that he won the eponymous competition in 1960), as was the rest of the standard 19^th-century piano repertoire, but he also was incomparable as the interpreter of the music of the Second Viennese School, and even more so as the performer of the contemporary music, much of it written by his friends: Luigi Nono, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Bruno Maderna, and many other.  He will be sorely missed.  Speaking of Pierre Boulez: his anniversary is this week as well: he was born on March 26^th of 1925. 

Also this week: Franz Joseph Haydn, born March 31^st of 1732; Carlo Gesualdo – on March 30^th of 1556; Johann Adolph Hasse, onMarch 25 of 1699; and one of our favorite composers of the 20^th century, Béla Bartók, on March 25^th of 1881.

This Week in Classical Music: March 18, 2024.  Classical Connect is on a hiatus.  Johann Sebastian Bach was born this week, on March 21^st of 1685 (old style), in Eisenach.  Here is the first part of Bach’s St. John Passion, one of his supreme masterpieces.

This Week in Classical Music: March 11, 2024.  Classical Connect is on a hiatus. 

This Week in Classical Music: March 4, 2024.  Luigi Dallapiccola, Part II.  Last week, we ended the story of the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola at the beginning of WWII.  Mussolini’s fascist state had passed race laws that restricted the civil rights of the Italian Jews, affecting Dallapiccola directly, as his wife was one of them.  Later laws would strip the Jews of their assets and send them into internal exile.  Italy was no Germany, and these laws weren’t enforced by the Mussolini fascists as they were by the Nazis: no Italian Jews were killed by the regime just because they were Jews (many political opponents of Mussolini were imprisoned and executed, and some of them were Jewish).  That state of affairs abruptly changed in 1943 when the Italian army surrendered to the Allies, and in response, the Nazis occupied all of the northern part of Italy.  During those years, Dallapiccola and his wife lived in Florence, where he was teaching at the conservatory – Florence was part of the occupied territory.  In 1943 and again in 1944, they were forced into hiding, first in a village outside the city, then in apartments in Florence.

Once the war was over, Dallapiccola’s life stabilized.  His opera Il prigioniero (The Prisoner), which he composed during the years 1944-48, was premiered in 1950 in Florence (the opera was based in part on the cycle Canti di prigionia, the first song of which we presented in our entry last week).  The opera's music was serialist; it was one of the first complete operas in this style, as Berg’s Lulu, the first serialist opera, had not yet been finished.  Hermann Scherchen, one of the utmost champions of 20th-century music, conducted the premiere.  Despite the music’s complexity, it was often performed in the 1950s and ‘60s.  Times have changed, but it’s still being performed, occasionally.  Here is the Prologue and the first Intermezzo (Choral) of the opera, about eight minutes of music.  It was recorded live in Bologna on April 16^th of 2011; Valentina Corradetti is the soprano singing the role of Mother, the orchestra and chorus of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna are conducted by Michele Mariotti.

In 1951, Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony and himself a champion of modern music, invited Dallapiccola to give lectures at the Tanglewood Festival.  After that first trip, Dallapiccola often traveled to the US, sometimes staying for a long time.  Dallapiccola, who spoke English, German and French, also traveled in Europe.  Interestingly, he never visited the Darmstadt Summer School, the gathering place for young composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna, who were experimenting with serial music and developing new idioms.  It’s especially surprising considering that he was very close to Luigi Nono, and that Luciano Berio, also a Darmstadt habitué, was his former student.  It seems that the Darmstadt composers were too cerebral and too radical for Dallapiccola, whose pieces, while strictly serial during that period, were infused with lyricism, somewhat in the manner of one of his idols, Alban Berg.

Dallapiccola’s last large composition was the opera Ulisse, which premiered in Berlin in 1968; Lorin Maazel was the conductor.  After that, Dallapiccola composed very little, his time went into adapting some of his lectures into a book.  He died on February 19^th of 1975 in Florence.

In 1971 Dallapiccolo compiled two suites based on Ulisse.  Here is one of them, called Suite/A.  The soprano Colette Herzog is Calypso, the baritone Claudio Desderi is Ulysses.  Ernest Bour conducts the Chorus and the Philharmonic Orchestra of the French Radio.

This Week in Classical Music: February 26, 2024.  Missed dates and Luigi Dallapiccola.  For the last three weeks, we’ve been preoccupied with Alban Berg, and we feel good about it: Berg was a revolutionary composer (not by his constitution but by the nature of his creative talent) and he should be celebrated, even if our time, philistine and woke, doesn’t suit him well.  The problem we have is that we missed several very significant anniversaries: for example, George Frideric Handel‘s – he was born on February 23^rd of 1685; also, one of the most interesting German composers of the 16^th century, Michael Praetorius, was born on February 15^th of 1571.  We missed the birthday of Francesco Cavalli, a very important composer in the history of opera, on February 14^th of 1602.  Two famous Italians were also born during those three weeks, Archangelo Corelli on February 17^th of 1653 and Luigi Boccherini, on February 19^th of 1743.  Of our contemporaries, György Kurtág, one of the most important composers of the late 20^th century, celebrated his 98^th (!) birthday on February 19^th.  And then this week, there are two big dates: Frédéric Chopin’s anniversary is on March 1^st (he was born in 1810) and Gioachino Rossini’s birthday will be celebrated on February 29^th – he was born 232 years ago, in 1792.  We’ve written about all these composers, about Handel and Chopin many times.  Today, though, we’ll remember an Italian whom we’ve mentioned several times but only alongside somebody else; his name is Luigi Dallapiccola, and his story has a connection to Alban Berg. 

Luigi Dallapiccola was born on February 3^rd of 1904 in the mostly Italian-populated town of Pisino, Istria, then part of the Austrian Empire.  Pisino was transferred to Italy after WWI, to Yugoslavia after WWII, as Pazin, and now is part of Croatia.  The Austrians sent the Dallapiccola family to Graz as subversives (Luigi, not being able to play the piano, enjoyed the opera performances there); they returned to Pisino only after the end of the war.  Luigi studied the piano in Trieste and in 1922 moved to Florence, where he continued with piano studies and composition, first privately and then at the conservatory.   During that time, he was so much taken by the music of Debussy that he stopped composing for three years, trying to absorb the influence.  A very different influence was Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, which Luigi heard in 1924 at a concert organized by Alfredo Casella (in the following years, Casella would become a big supporter and promoter of Dallapiccola’s music). 

Upon graduation, Dallapiccola started giving recitals around Italy, later securing a position at the Florence Conservatory where he taught for more than 30 years, till 1967 (among his students was Luciano Berio).  In 1930 in Vienna, he heard Mahler’s First Symphony, which also affected him strongly: at the time, Mahler’s music was practically unknown in Italy.  In the 1930s, Dallapiccola's life underwent major changes.  Musically, he became more influenced by the Second Viennese School, and in 1934 got to know Alban Berg (in 1942, while passing through Austria to a concert in Switzerland, he met Anton Webern).  The policies of Italy also affected him greatly: first, he was taken by Mussolini’s rhetoric, openly becoming his supporter.  This changed with the Abyssinian and Spanish wars, which Dallapiccola protested, and then much more so when Mussolini, under pressure from Hitler, adopted racial (for all practical purposes, antisemitic) policies: Dallapiccola’s wife, Laura Luzzatto, was Jewish.  They married on May 1, 1938; the racial laws were adopted in November of that year.  Here, from 1938, is the first of the three Canti di Prigionia (Songs of Imprisonment), Preghiera di Maria Stuarda (A Prayer of Mary Stuart) written, in part, as a protest against Mussolini’s racial laws.  The New London Chamber Choir is conducted by James Wood, and the Ensemble Intercontemporain, by Hans Zender.  We’ll continue with the life and music of Luigi Dallapiccola next week.   

This Week in Classical Music: February 19, 2024.  Alban Berg, Part III, Lulu.  Frank Wedekind was a famous (and controversial) German playwright.  Among his more famous plays 

were two, Earth Spirit, written in 1895, and Pandora's Box, from 1904, usually paired together and called Lulu plays, after the name of the protagonist.  For a while, the plays were banned for presumed obscenity.  Berg saw the plays in the early 1900s in Berlin, with Wedekind himself playing Jack the Ripper in Pandora's Box.  He was much taken by the plays, and some quarter century later, following the success of his first opera, Wozzeck, decided to write another one, based on Wedekind’s plays.  The storyline of the plays is convoluted: Lulu, an impoverished girl, is saved by a rich publisher, Dr. Schön, from life on the streets.  Schön brings her up and makes her his lover.  Later, he marries Lulu off to one Dr. Goll.  The painter Schwarz gets involved; Lulu seduces him, and poor Dr. Goll dies of a heart attack upon learning of Lulu’s betrayal.  Lulu marries painter Schwarz while remaining Dr. Schön’s mistress.  Dr. Schön tells Schwarz about Lulu’s past; overwhelmed, Schwarz kills himself.  Eventually, Lulu marries Dr. Schön but is unfaithful to him, sleeping with Schön’s son Alwa and other men and women.  Once Schön discovers her affairs, he gives Lulu a gun to kill herself - but instead, she shoots him.  Lulu is imprisoned at the end of Earth Spirit.  In Pandora's Box, Lulu escapes from prison with help from her lesbian lover and marries Alwa, Dr. Schön’s son, (whose father Lulu killed in cold blood).  She’s then blackmailed by her former companions and subsequently loses all her money when a certain company’s shares, Lulu’s main asset, become worthless.  Lulu and Alwa move to London; destitute, she works as a streetwalker.   One of her clients kills Alwa, and eventually, Lulu herself is killed by Jack the Ripper. 

By 1929, when Berg started working on Lulu, he was financially secure and quite famous, thanks to the popularity of Wozzeck.  He used Wedekind’s Earth Spirit to write the libretto for Act I and part of Act II, and Pandora's Box for the rest of what he planned as a three-act opera.  He worked on it for the next five years and mostly completed it in what’s called a “short score,” without complete orchestration, in 1934.  By then the Naxis were in power and the cultural situation had changed dramatically.  Berg’s position was difficult on two accounts: first, because of the kind of music he was composing (by now not just atonal but 12-tonal) – the Nazis considered it “Entartete,” that is “Degenerate.”  And secondly, he was a pupil of a famous Jewish composer, Schoenberg, and that, in the eyes of the regime, tainted him even more.  Wozzeck was banned (Erich Kleiber conducted the last performance of the opera in November of 1932), practically none of his music was being performed, and Berg’s financial situation was precarious.  In January of 1935, the American violinist Louis Krasner commissioned Berg a violin concerto; financially, that was of great help and the concerto, dedicated to the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and the architect Walter Gropius, who died of polio, became one of Berg’s most successful compositions.

Understanding that Lulu most likely wouldn’t be staged in Germany – or anywhere else – anytime soon, Berg decided to write a suite for soprano and orchestra based on the opera, the so-called Lulu Suite.  Erich Kleiber performed it in November of 1934, it was well received by the public but the level of condemnation by Goebbels and his underlings was such that Kleiber was not only forced to resign from the Berlin Opera but emigrated from Germany.  Berg continued working on the orchestration of Lulu but never completed it: in November of 1935 he was bitten by an insect, that developed into a furuncle, which led to blood poisoning.  Berg died on Christmas Eve of 1935.  In 1979, the Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha completed the orchestration of the third act; this became the standard version of Lulu.

Here is Berg’s Lulu Suite.  It’s performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Simon Rattle conducting.  Arleen Auger is the soprano.